Will the advertisers turn Twitter into TV?

A lot of raw ideas here, sorry -- I wanted to get this all down and think some more. That's what my blog is for in case you're new here.

First, how long will it be before there's a little video box on the Twitter home page that shows you whatever it is we're all watching. Because there are moments when it seems everyone on Twitter is watching one program on TV. The SuperBowl, the MTV awards, the Breaking Bad finale, etc. It seems inevitable that before too long you'll be able to watch the show right there in Twitter without budging.

Then it occurs to me that the advertisers could be the ones who drive this. They're obviously going to some new places with interactive advertising. For example, today I got a tweet from the Central Park Conservancy, an account that I follow (I live near the park and use it a lot) offering to subscribe me to their email newsletter. The button to click was in Twitter. I bet they paid Twitter a lot of money for that, or perhaps Twitter is doing the fulfillment and not sharing my email address with them. Either way, it's another way for Twitter to get rich, and there was no TV involved.

Not that it would matter. I'm simply not available on TV these days. I know CNN is covering the DC shooting every minute, and they're getting all wrapped up with the next budget battle. I catch little glimpses at those things in my rivers. But I don't connect my emotions up to those stories. Those are TV stories.

Evan Williams was right, btw, about tech news being disconnected from tech. Where were all of them while the industry was getting owned by the NSA. Why did it wait until the story was gifted to one of them by a leaker. And the biggest tech story in a generation wasn't even reported by tech. Couldn't the NSA presence have been felt, and reported on, by all the reporters covering Washington on the net? Where was Kos and Talking Point Memo, Andrew Sullivan? But as Williams says if they're watching the tech they're doing it superficially, thinking the story is somewhere else. The only thing I'd fault him for is that he didn't go far enough, because basically all reporters these days are tech reporters.

There's no doubt that all media is vulnerable to Twitter now, and Williams knows as well as anyone where the gaps are. He gets a lot better data on it, I assume, than the rest of us do. And they're doing some creative stuff with advertising on Twitter, stuff that the TV networks are nowhere near doing.

I'm getting a feeling that things are about to shift pretty radically.